


the weeds bend (but they don't break)

by kitsunerei88



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27778864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88
Summary: A picture carries a thousand lies. The people of the Capitol are shallow, but it is a studied shallowness, an intentional shallowness, because anything with depth is liable to be reported. The Capitol doesn’t like depths—people with depths are dangerous, and those who want to survive learn to stay simple, stay shallow, and smile.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18
Collections: Books of Yule





	the weeds bend (but they don't break)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FictionPenned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/gifts).



There are rules for surviving the Capitol.

In the Districts, Effie knows, the people think that the Capitol is shallow. It is. The bright, coloured lights in the streets are always lit; there is always a festival of some kind or another spilling out into the wide avenues and expansive green parks of the city. It is always loud with chatter, with music and parades and a dozen other things, and the people are always laughing, always smiling, always bright and flashy and gaudy with the newest fashions. A thousand colours, a thousand textures, a hundred thousand sounds fill the Capitol with life, and it is easy to believe that those who live there have not a single thought in their heads.

A picture carries a thousand lies. The people of the Capitol are shallow, but it is a studied shallowness, an intentional shallowness, because anything with depth is liable to be reported. The Capitol doesn’t like depths—people with depths are dangerous, and those who want to survive learn to stay simple, stay shallow, and smile.

Underneath the bright lights of the Capitol lies a dark truth: a Capitol citizen is less than anyone in the Districts. Less free. Less safe. Less united.

The people of the Districts are impoverished, but they have each other. They have the Peacekeepers, a motley crew of easily identifiable targets, but they don’t have the secret police. They have the Reaping, a carefully constructed theatre to choose their sacrifices. They have desperation, but they do not know fear.

Effie can’t count the number of friends she has lost through the years. The secret police are everywhere—there is nowhere safe for seditious thoughts except the precarious, easily betrayed safety of one’s own head. The plentiful, ever-flowing alcohol makes tongues loose, and the security of pretended close friendships even looser. There is nowhere safe. There is no one safe.

The only way to survive is to smile and say nothing.

* * *

Effie doesn’t start her career in the Hunger Games. There are precious few industries in the Capitol proper: there is the bloated government administration, and there are the services. Effie thinks the latter is safer than the former, and she takes her first few jobs in organizing festivals. Film festivals, holiday festivals, anything that came up and she would find the space, book the entertainment, and handle the marketing.

The festivals are loud and distracting, an easy place to lose herself. As a festival organizer, she has an easy excuse for staying sober during the events—tongues might wag around her, and the crowds are always full of ears, but she doesn’t talk. Not about anything of substance.

It is almost a surprise when she is hired to work The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games are prestigious, the highlight of every year, and despite her misgivings, she can’t say no.

One does not decline an invitation to join the Hunger Games. In the Districts, Effie later learns, The Hunger Games are required viewing. The entire country receives two weeks off, explicitly to watch the annual theatrical bloodbath, but here is the difference: in the Districts, no one is supposed to enjoy it. The Hunger Games are intended to be their humiliation, an annual reminder of the rebellions that destroyed the country and they are not supposed to enjoy the loss.

The Capitol is different. In the Capitol, The Hunger Games are their glory, an annual reminder of their victory, and they are intended to be savoured. For a Capitol citizen, refusing to become part of the Hunger Games is edging dangerously close to voicing discontent with the Capitol itself.

Any Capitol citizen can name a half-dozen people who questioned the Capitol in a time or place they should not have done. Some get off with a questioning—others are less lucky. Those that are less lucky linger in the minds of their friends and family forever.

Its with a list of people in mind that Effie smiles, and she gushes her pleasure in being picked to act the delegate and guide for District Twelve, and she joins the Hunger Games.

* * *

When Effie goes to District Twelve for the first time, she is at first struck by the poverty. She is there for a single day every year, and she never sees anything other than the finest waiting rooms in what passes for city hall in the centre of town. The layers of dust in the room, ever present despite the obvious last-minute attempt to clean, are always cloying; the furnishings are at least forty years out of date. She knows well that she only sees the best part of town, and if this is the best, then she can only imagine the rest of the District.

She feels the hate emanating from the people of District Twelve the moment she steps into the carefully ordered crowd to draw names. From some, such as the mayor or the townsfolk, those in the cleanest, most pressed clothing, it is an exhausted, defeated kind of hate—from others, the ones standing further away with dark hair and eyes and darkly tanned skin, their hate is a thrown weapon, boiling in rage.

She pretends she doesn’t notice. The ears are everywhere—there’s at least one on the train with her. She can’t afford to notice, and she sets herself to her task with the commitment of someone intent on ignoring the unignorable. She is the executioner, and she draws names out of the bowl with nothing but smiles and excitement.

The first few years are the hardest. District Twelve has the smallest, scrawniest children; fighting spirit they have aplenty, but all the spirit in the world doesn’t make up for years of malnutrition and a lack of useful skills. Her tributes die, year after year, and she learns not to get attached. The other escorts, when deep in their cups, occasionally murmur about their losses—but they tend to be pulled in for questioning afterwards, and they learn to cope in silence. A hint of special kindness or sympathy in their eyes as they congratulate each other or celebrate is all most of them allow each other.

That is not to say that there isn’t dissonance and sedition roaring around her. Effie might say little of substance, but she listens. There are always whispers around the past Victors, and she even suspects that some of the Gamemakers or stylists may be involved. But she also sees the punishments laid on by the Capitol, nearly fifty years of punishments in a running list of the disappeared and the presumed dead, and she cannot imagine they will ever succeed. She doesn’t participate.

But she says nothing about what she hears.

* * *

The victory of Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark in the 74th Hunger Games is an unexpected joy. For once, her smiles are genuine as they’re crowned, even if she knows that they’ve both lived through something that no one ought to have suffered. They’re alive, she thinks—the rest can come so long as they live.

And yet, when they’re called again for the 75th Hunger Games, her façade cracks. She can’t help but weep slightly, sending them into the arena again—her usual smile is there, but for the first time in as long as she can remember, it’s imperfect. It doesn’t hide the feelings that she’s not allowed to feel, and it doesn’t cover her depths. They’re there, for anyone who wants to look, and Effie counts herself lucky that no one is looking. They are too distracted by the others.

For the first time in her memory, the streets of the Capitol are in uproar. There are too many Capitol citizens who hate the 75th Hunger Games, and they want them over as soon as possible. They want a miracle to save their Victors, just as President Snow wants to murder all of them to show that even the best of the Districts cannot defeat the might of the Capitol. For once, Effie wonders if the people of the Capitol and those of the Districts might be united, if only for a brief instant in time, by their desire for no Games at all.

As the protests rage on, Effie wonders if there might not be a path to success. The people on the streets are not those of the festivals—the people on the street are angry, and they’re sad, and they’re desperate, and they are a million things that good Capitol citizen is not allowed to be. The people on the streets are real, even in their brightly coloured and strangely textured fineries, and they cry out for something that they do not have. It lights a fire in her, one that she hasn’t felt for many years, one that reminds her that once, life was not only fear.

The day that the District Thirteen troops storm the centre of operations, Effie is waiting with a packed bag.

“Effie Trinket?” the man says, his foot heavy on the door that he had just kicked down, his arms full with a black-barrelled rifle that Effie can’t mistake, not after so many years in the Hunger Games. “I’m going to need you to come with me.”

“With pleasure,” Effie replies, and she smiles.


End file.
